The Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal and legal immigration has exacerbated America’s worker shortage. The results have been predictable.
President Donald Trump ran on securing America’s border and deporting illegal immigrants, especially those who had committed crimes after entering the country.
Nearly 3 million left the U.S. in 2025, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The agency says that 2.2 million “self-deported” while some 675,000 were removed by law enforcement. Most of these were not hardened criminals but economic migrants.
Meanwhile, the administration has imposed a raft of measures to hinder legal immigration.
In January, the State Department announced that it had paused issuing green cards to people from 75 countries. New vetting procedures meant fewer student visas would be issued, and more broadly staff have been diverted to focus on revetting applicants rather than processing immigration applications.
Meanwhile, evidence of worker shortages is everywhere: from cattle operations in Kansas to the crawfish industry in Louisiana. Restaurants and hotels report more than 900,000 vacant jobs. More than half of dine-in restaurants surveyed by the National Restaurant Association report fewer applicants for “kitchen-support positions” in 2025.
A record number of D.C. restaurants closed last year, thanks to higher operating costs and fewer available workers.
Roughly 20 percent of the U.S. workforce is still made up of foreign-born workers. The introduction of a $100,000 fee for foreign workers to secure H-1B visas led to a predictable collapse of applications this year, but the jobs immigrants fill vary.
Meta President Dina Powell McCormick warns that the U.S. will need a “whole new workforce” to support the artificial intelligence revolution, and it’s not just software developers.
“Just in the next two years, 500,000 electricians are needed to build all the infrastructure that’s going to be needed just in the United States,” she said last month.
The administration has made some moves to ease the pain caused by other restrictions. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security and Labor Department nearly doubled the number of available visas for temporary nonagricultural workers from its previous cap of 66,000.
But temporary tweaks won’t solve the imbalance in a country where the national unemployment rate edged down to 4.3 percent in March.
America needs an orderly border, and the best way to reduce illegal immigration is to create easier legal pathways for people who want to fill jobs that otherwise sit vacant.
